While Canonical remains committed to Mir as the future display server technology for Ubuntu Linux both on the desktop and for mobile devices, the upcoming Ubuntu 15.04 release does have the latest Wayland/Weston 1.7 support too.

Wayland 1.7.0 along with the reference Weston 1.7 compositor were released in the early hours of the morning as a great Valentine's Day gift to open-source users wishing to run the next-generation Linux display stack. The Wayland/Weston 1.7 release continues polishing up the stack as an alternative to the security-ridden X.Org Server.

With GNOME 3.16 the developers are working hard at making their native Wayland support be rock-solid and reliable for day-to-day use for those wishing to abandon running their GNOME desktop on an X.Org Server. An important feature has finally landed for GTK+ applications in the Wayland world: the ability to minimize windows.

While Wayland by default replacing the X.Org Server as the default display environment has been talked about for a while within the next-generation Fedora world, it looks like Fedora 23 could finally be the time that the switch happens.

Going along with yesterday's X.Org Server Saw More Code In 2014 Than 2013, But Its Heydays Are Over article looking at X.Org development statistics for 2014, here's a look at the Wayland's development for last year.

One of the commonly asked questions is whether using Wayland will be more power efficient or save power compared to running the same software under an X.Org Server environment. Here's a simple test of GNOME on Wayland in Fedora 21 while monitoring a laptop's battery use.

While many view Wayland as the future of the Linux desktop, the X.Org Server shows no signs of disappearing anytime soon as beyond needing it for legacy X11 applications, there's still much innovation happening within the conventional xorg-server as shown by the progress it's made in 2014.

Pekka Paalanen, the Collabora developer who has effectively been serving as the Wayland/Weston release manager with Kristian Høgsberg still being away from Wayland development, is seeking some discussion from Wayland developers about their intended view of Wayland's Weston compositor and what direction it should take moving forward.